


feel it still

by fictionalinfinity



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Enemies, Gen, enemies au, ladynoir enemies au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:40:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28655109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fictionalinfinity/pseuds/fictionalinfinity
Summary: “Come with me. We can still be a team,” Ladybug whispers, stretching out her hand to him. Although she tries to hide it, Chat can see just how badly her hands shake. How tired her eyes are. How unkempt her pigtails are. She is a fragile piece of glass waiting to shatter.Maybe if Chat takes her hand, he can help keep her together.For a moment, he is tempted. Chat’s hand reaches forward of its own accord, nearly laying it atop her own before his senses return to him. He snatches it back as if he’s been burned.“No,” Chat croaks, tongues of fire licking at his throat.  He can see exactly when Ladybug registers the rejection. Her tired eyes harden.Without another word, Ladybug leaves.-enemies au
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 19
Kudos: 48





	feel it still

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theriveroflight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theriveroflight/gifts).



> Congrats on reaching level 50, River! This fic is well overdue, whoops. Anyway, I hope you like it!

_ “Come with me. We can still be a team,” Ladybug whispers, stretching out her hand to him. Although she tries to hide it, Chat can see just how badly her hands shake. How tired her eyes are. How unkempt her pigtails are. She is a fragile piece of glass waiting to shatter.  _

_ Maybe if Chat takes her hand, he can help keep her together. _

_ For a moment, he is tempted. Chat’s hand reaches forward of its own accord, nearly laying it atop her own before his senses return to him. He snatches it back as if he’s been burned. _

_ “No,” Chat croaks, tongues of fire licking at his throat. He can see exactly when Ladybug registers the rejection. Her tired eyes harden.  _

_ Without another word, Ladybug leaves. _

-

It is nearly two months after Ladybug’s departure, during a rather intense akuma fight, that Chat Noir is forced to partner with her once more. Usually she pursues both himself and the akuma, making his heart pound and fists shake as she attempts to catch both the butterfly and his ring. Not once has Ladybug asked him to join her, at least not since he rejected her the first time.

Part of Chat almost wishes she would ask. At least then, he’d know she still cared for him. 

Chat can’t dwell on it. He made his choice that day, and so did Ladybug. What’s done is done. Yet, the thought of reuniting with her, righting all of their wrongs and forgiving all of their sins, is not an easy one to ignore when the akuma locks them in a tight box together with no clear escape.

Ladybug kicks frustratedly against the wall of their prison, the energy reverberating through the walls before fizzling out and leaving them back where they started.

“Well, I don’t see a door,” Chat huffs, casting his eyes over the small space which encloses them. He can feel his chest constricting and it's becoming a little hard to breathe. Subtly, he slides his hand behind his back and out of her reach. Her eyes follow the movement keenly.

“You’re afraid of me,” Ladybug states.

It’s not a question, not with her. She reads him like a book, a habit left behind by their years of friendship. It’s as if not a day has passed since she left him. 

Chat is desperate to deny it. He can’t let her see the way his frame trembles and aches to fall right into her arms and plead forgiveness and acceptance. And yet, another part of him resents her. Resents her decision to forsake their duty, their  _ partnership, _ to go rogue and abandon him. To become his enemy. 

But no matter how much he wants to, he can’t deny it.

Chat is afraid of her. Afraid of just how badly she can hurt him again.

When he fails to reply, Ladybug bites her lip and glares at him in a way he can’t read. Chat meets her gaze as bravely as he can, summoning up all of his courage to maintain this prolonged intimacy. She ducks her eyes after a few moments and a small, involuntary breath of relief makes its way past his lips. 

Ladybug opens her mouth to speak and Chat tenses up once again, expecting her to spout more hurtful things, but what happens next surprises him. 

“Was it all a lie?” 

Chat blurts it out without thinking, before slapping his hands over his mouth. He hadn’t meant to do that! 

Ladybug freezes, her mouth hanging open as she stares at him. Chat wants to take the words back, but it is too late. They hang in between them thickly, hovering dangerously like an axe waiting to fall. 

A silent moment passes.

“...No, Chat.”

He isn’t sure how to feel after the admission. Would it be better if it had all been a lie from the start? It was almost worse that some of it  _ had _ been real, but hadn’t mattered enough to make her stay.

The mere thought of it has the pain he’d buried rushing back to the surface. He blinked away tears. 

“So what made you do it? What was so bad about… all of this, that you couldn’t stay?”

“I have to get all of the Miraculous away from Fu, because he’s  _ using _ you, Chat, just like he used me. You just don’t want to see it. We were just kids and he put the weight of the world on our shoulders. He let us fix his own mistakes. Doesn’t that bother you?”

_ No, it doesn’t, _ Chat thinks. Because while it was a lot of responsibility, it granted him a lot of freedoms. It gave him a friend in Plagg and a way to break free from the constraints of his home life. He wouldn’t betray the man who had given him that, even if he was fixing someone else’s problems. Paris needed a hero. 

“People make mistakes! He was doing his best to fix them by recruiting us. And… sometimes adults make decisions we have to respect, okay? We don’t have to like it, but we should listen to their authority,” Chat reasoned.

“You’ve told me enough about your home life for me to know that’s your father talking, Chat! Just because it’s a decision an adult made doesn’t make it the right one,” Ladybug shouts, gesturing so wildly that her hands slapped the roof of their prison. The ringing that followed made him shrink away wincing. 

Ladybug deflates a bit at his expression. “I’m… I shouldn’t have yelled. But you have to understand that what’s happening to you  _ isn’t _ right. What Fu’s doing to you  _ isn’t _ right, Chaton.”

At hearing her old nickname for him, Chat can see the old Ladybug peeking through the cracks and reaching for him. He desperately wants to go to her and never leave her again, but he knows he can’t.

He just…  _ can’t. _

She must see it in his face, because the affection is gone in an instant. A cold feeling of unease washes over him as she resets.

“How are we supposed to get out of here? That akuma is probably wreaking havoc outside,” Ladybug ponders, feeling up and down the walls. Despite himself, Chat almost falls right back into his old role, waiting anxiously to hear her plan. He shakes his head in an attempt to snap out of it.

“There’s no weaknesses in the walls we can utilize…” Ladybug says to herself. “Could our weapons potentially cut through it?”

“Uh, My… er, Ladybug?”

“What is it?” Ladybug asks distractedly, her eyes still roaming the walls.

“What about my cataclysm?” Chat offers.

Ladybug startles. She gapes at him for a moment while he waits silently. “I…”  _ forgot I could use that to my advantage, _ are the words she doesn’t say. It’s been a while since she had his powers at her disposal.

“...Do it,” she finally says, her voice thick with emotion. With a single nod, Chat calls on the power and casts it on their prison. It feels like a cruel mockery of who they used to be, him using his powers for her. But if it had been like old times, Ladybug wouldn’t have had to wait for him to offer it up. She would’ve just  _ known. _

The walls of their cage crumble to dust around them. Just like their partnership had done, not so long ago. 

Sunlight floods his eyes and he blinks quickly to adjust, wishing he could go back into the darkness of that box. He knows that when the dust settles, despite the glimpse of affection he saw, they must return to their own sides of this cold, lonely war. The thought of it has emptiness clawing at him. 

When he opens his eyes, Ladybug is nowhere to be found.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for River, as a reward for reaching level 50 on the leaderboard of the [Miraculous Fanworks Discord Server](https://discord.gg/mlfanworks). If you're interested in a fun place to discuss all things Miraculous Fanworks, feel free to join!


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